Peter Watts - Maelstrom

There was a row of vending machines lined up on the far wall of the concourse: medbooths, fashion dispensers, arrays of prepackaged foods. Vive shouldered her way through the crowd, homing in on a holographic Donair turning in space like some edible Holy Grail.

Someone grabbed her from behind.

Before she could react she was inside one of the medbooths, pushed up against the sensor panel. A woman with shoulder-length blond hair pinned her there, one hand splayed against Vive's sternum. She wasn't on the team; she had a visor across her eyes, and a backpack, and the rest of her wasn't rifter either. A pissed-off pedestrian maybe, caught in the swarm.

The medbooth door hissed shut behind her, blocking the deciblage from outside. The woman leaned back, opening a bit of a space in the crowded enclosure.

"What is this?" the woman said.

"This is really rude," Vive snapped back. "Also kidnapping or something probably. Not that those—"

"Why are you—" The woman paused. "Why the costume? What's going on?"

"It's a street party. I guess you never got invit—"

The woman leaned fractionally closer. Vive shut up. There was something about this situation that was starting to give her serious pause.

"Answer me," the crazy woman said.

"We're—we're rifters," Vive told her.

"Right."

"Lenie Clarke's in town. Haven't you heard?"

"Lenie Clarke." The crazy woman took her hand off Vive's chest. "No shit."

"None at all."

A sudden dim sound, like distant surf, filtered in from outside. The crazy woman didn't seem to notice.

"This is insane." She shook her head. "What are you going to do, exactly, when Lenie Clarke shows up?"

"Look, we're just here to see what happens. I don't make up the threads, all right?"

"Get an autograph, maybe. Get a gram of flesh or two, if there's enough to go around."

Suddenly, that voice had turned very flat and very scary.

She could kill me, Vive thought.

She kept her own voice sweet and reasonable. Meek, even: "We're not hurting you. We're not hurting anyone ."

" Really ." The crazy woman leaned in close. "You sure about that? Do you have the slightest clue who this Lenie Clarke even is ?"

Vive broke.

It wasn't a plan. At least it wasn't a very good one. The medbooth barely held both of them, and the door was behind the crazy woman: there was no room around . Vive just sprang forward like a cornered dog, tried desperately to squirm past. Both fell back into the door; the door, obligingly, slid open.

Even in that split-second, Vive took it in: a botfly nearby, spewing canned warnings about orderly dispersal. The movement of the crowd, no longer vague and diffuse but concentrated , pushed together like a school of krill in a purse seine. Conversation fading; shouts starting up.

The herding was underway.

Vive's momentum carried the crazy woman less than a meter before the edge of the crowd pushed back. The rebound put both of them inside the booth again. Vive launched herself low, under the other woman's arm—sudden, tearing pain over one eye—

" Ow! "

— and a hand closed around her throat, pushed her back, her legs shooting out from under her, her feet briefly trampled by some nameless crowd-particle until she pulled them back with a cry and the door slid shut again, cutting the outside world down to a faint roar.

Oh, felch…

Aviva Lu sat on the floor of the medbooth, her legs pulled up in front of her, and forced her eyes to track upward. Crazy Woman's legs. Crazy Woman's crotch. It seemed like it would take forever to get to the eyes, and Vive was terrified of what she'd find when she got—

Wait a second—

There, just to the left of Crazy Woman's sternum—a tear in her clothing, a hard crescent glint of metal.

That's what cut me. Something metal on her chest. Sticking out of her chest…

Crazy woman's hand. Holding her visor, broken in the scuffle, one earpiece gone. Crazy woman's throat; a turtleneck sweatshirt covering any disfigurement there.

Crazy woman's eyes.

What had she said? That's right: Do you have the slightest clue who this Lenie Clarke even is?

"Oh, wow ," said Aviva Lu.

"You're kidding," said Lenie Clarke. They stood facing each other, breathing each other's air in the medbooth.

"One thread said you were infected with nanobots that could reproduce outside your body and start fires when they had a big enough population. They said you were fucking your way across the world to infect everyone else, so we'd all have the power someday."

"It's bullshit," Clarke said. "It's all bullshit. I don't know how it got started."

"All of it?" Vive didn't know what to make of all this. For the Meltdown Madonna, Lenie Clarke didn't seem to have a clue. "You're not on some kind of crusade, you're not—"

"Oh, I'm on a crusade all right." Lenie flashed a smile that Vive couldn't decompile. "I just don't think any of you want to see it succeed."

"Well, you were down in the ocean," Vive said. "For the Big One. What happened down there?" It couldn't all be detritus, could it? "And on the Strip? And—"

"What's happening right here ?" Lenie said.

Vive gulped. "Right."

"How did they even know about me? How did you know?"

"Well, like I said, someone spread the word."

Lenie shook her head. "I guess I'd be caught right now if it wasn't for…" — faint crowd sounds filtered through from outside—" that …"

"Well, they'll never tag you on visual," Vive said. "There's like a few sagan Lenie Clarkes out there, and you don't look like any of 'em."

"Yeah. And how many of them have a chestful of machinery to go with the eyecaps?"

Vive shrugged. "Probably none. But— oh . The botflies."

"The botflies." The Meltdown Madonna took a deep breath. "If they haven't tagged me already, I'm going to be a big bright EM rainbow the second I step outside."

"I wondered why they weren't jamming our watches," Vive said. "They don't want to scramble your sig."

"What if I just wait in here until everybody goes away?"

"Won't work. I've run this before; half-hour, tops, before they gas the whole place and just walk in."

"Shit. Shit ." Lenie looked around the booth like some kind of caged alien.

"Wait a sec," Vive said. "Are they looking for your exact signature, or just any old EM?"

"How should I know?"

"Well, how do your implants shine?"

"A lot of myoelectrics. Boosted source for the electrolysis assembly and the reservoir dumps, of course. And the vocoder." The rifter smiled, a tiny challenge. "That mean anything to you?"

"Like a prosthetic heart, only stronger."

"Got any friends with a fake heart? Maybe I could use them as a decoy."

" Les beus might just round up everyone with implants and sort 'em out later." Vive thought. "You don't need a decoy, though. You just need to jam your own signal. You shouldn't be putting out more than two milligausse, tops. Standard wall line would mask that, but then you wouldn't be able to move away from the wall. And watches and visors don't have the field strength."

Lenie cocked her head. "You some kind of expert?"

Vive smiled back. "Lady, this is Yankton ! We've been doing electronics since before the Dust Belt. Lins says they even invented botflies here, but Lins slings a lot of slaw. We're supposed to be cramming for our practicums even as we speak, actually, but this sounded like more fun."

"Fun." Those cold blank eyes—more translucent, Vive realized, than the paste the rest of them wore—stared down at her. "That's the word I would've used."